


Moxie

by Untherius



Category: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Genre: Alien Invasion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Untherius/pseuds/Untherius
Summary: Amid the almost-remembered half-memories, every abductee wonders what happened, and if their alien abductors did anything to them.  Barry knows they did.  And it's what he knows that gives him far more trouble than what he doesn't.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bethynyc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bethynyc/gifts).



“Guiler! What the hell are you doing?!”

Barry shifted his attention from the quarterback to his gym coach, then back again.

 _Great_ , he thought. _Another damned deer-in-the-headlights moment. Just great._

He really had very little idea just what he was doing. One moment, Dirk Walker had been taunting him, yet again, about something that was complete horse-crap, yet again, and the next thing he knew, he’d hoisted the jerk up off the floor and pinned him up against the wall with his off hand.

Which was where he was now, feet dangling a foot in the air, heels drumming, eyes wide, and the leather of his probably expensive jacket stretching under the weight of more than two hundred pounds of football player, and audible in the abruptly fallen silence.

“Put him down,” growled the coach.

Barry glared at Dirk. With a snort, he let go and stepped back.

For a moment, Dirk hung in mid-air. Then, faster than anyone could blink, he dropped. He hit the floor with an unnatural thud, overlain by the distinctive snap of bone and a girly wail, the sounds bouncing off the gymnasium walls.

The coach peered at Barry. “Stay here, Guiler.” He turned and barked some commands at several of the other boys, who picked Dirk up off the floor and carried him out toward the school's infirmary.

Ten minutes later, Barry stood in Coach Stafford’s office, sweat trickling down his back. The cat was finally out of the bag, he knew it. And this time, he was going to be carted off to some secret government lab and probed...or something else just as unpleasant.

Stafford leaned on his desk, bulging biceps as big as Barry’s leg. “Guiler,” he said after a long pause that was probably intended to make Barry squirm, “what the hell was that?”

Even if Stafford hadn’t been trying to make Barry squirm, it worked anyway. “Um...uh...” he stammered.

“Stop stammering, man! Just answer the question.”

“He ticked me off...sir.”

Stafford’s eyes narrowed. “He ticked you off,” he repeated. “Well, that much is obvious. Between you, me, and the lamppost, Dirk Walker ticks everyone off. Hell, I think he even ticks himself off.”

Barry snickered.

“Wipe that smile off your face, Guiler!” Stafford snapped. “Walker broke both the tibia and fibula of his left leg. I hope you’ve been paying enough attention in Biology to know where those are. The point is, he’s out for the season.”

“Good,” Barry growled. “Maybe that’ll teach him a lesson.”

“Good? Dammit, Guiler, it’s anything but. A young man broke his leg, and now this school has zero chances for winning the championship, thanks to you.”

“So?”

“I should give you thirty push-ups just for that.”

“Then do it,” Barry snapped. “Because I don’t give a crap about football, or the way this school, and probably every other one, drools all over it, and I don’t give a crap about Dirk fu...”

“That’s enough!” Stafford barked. He stepped around the table to loom over Barry. “Now, we’re going to go back to square one. First, you’re going to tell me how you did that.”

Barry met Stafford’s gaze. At length, he said, “Adrenaline?”

He knew the moment he said it that the coach didn’t buy it. He didn’t even buy it himself. How a fourteen-year-old boy, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds when soaking wet could pick up a guy twice his weight with his off arm strained credulity, even with adrenaline as a factor.

Drugs, maybe? But Coach Stafford, an ex-Marine with a gleeful fondness for burpees and isometric pushups, was bound to know the other signs, and Barry was sure he exhibited none of them. There certainly weren’t many other explanations.

Truth be told, he still had no idea. All he knew was that ever since he’d been abducted by aliens at the age of four, he could lift heavy things and make light things heavier.

At first, he hadn’t even been aware it was being done at all. Not until after his eighth birthday had he realized he’d been doing those things all along. It had been at least a year later when it had dawned on him that he could control it, and another couple of years to learn how. Only recently had he figured out just what “it” was.

The upshot of it all was that he had the power to manipulate gravity. He still had no idea how or why, though he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the aliens had done it to him. Of course, his only evidence was that before the aliens, he’d been normal, and afterward, not so much.

Also of course, there was no way in hell he was ever going to tell anyone. He’d seen enough movies and TV to know that someone, probably multiple someones, would make endless and merciless off-color wise cracks about probing. The thing was, he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been probed.

God alone knew what had been done to him and how. His best guess was his pituitary gland, but that was just a guess based on some sketchy reading he'd done on some even sketchier experiments done in the sixties. None of that was likely to help his case. Not now, probably not ever.

Contrition, faked in his case, looked like his only option.

“I'm sorry,” he said at length.

“Are you?”

“A little.”

“Well, I'll give you a couple of points for honesty.” Stafford leaned a hand on his desk and peered at Barry for several uncomfortable moments. “Guiler, what am I going to do with you? You're well-behaved most of the time, but when you're not, it's a doozy. Knowing the Walkers, I won't be surprised if they file assault charges. And that's just for _this_ time. From my end, you're the best jumper I've ever seen. You could win multiple gold medals at the Olympics and smash every track-and-field record there is. Pole vault, high jump, long jump, javelin, you name it.

“But that's not going to happen if you get yourself thrown in juvie. And you know why? Because you don't have discipline. And without that, you'll wind up mopping floors or digging ditches. I know you're better than that, but you have to pull it together. And that means _not_ doing things like slamming people up against walls, holding the bench bar on their chests, putting dents in the gym floor, or tampering with the locker room scale.”

“But you're ex-Marine.”

“And you think that means the only thing I know how to do is bash heads? Barry, despite what the general public thinks about the Armed Forces, that's not what it's about. It's at least as important to know when and how _not_ to bash heads.”

“Violence is the only language some people, speak,” Barry protested.

“You're not wrong. But you have to be above that. If you're going to get back at people like Dirk, you have to use your head. Be sneakier about it. Think long-term.”

“Like, becoming his boss and making HIM dig the ditches and mop the floors?”

Stafford smiled. “Exactly like that. Which is another thing that's not going to happen if you wind up in juvie. Now, I'm required to write you up for this. Just so you know it's not personal.”

“What about Dirk?”

“Oh, I have to write him up, too. But he also has a broken leg and possibly a derailed football career. And you, young man, have some decisions to make and some thinking to do. I suggest you do it some time this week. Dismissed.”

Barry had just enough time to run to his locker and collect the books he needed for his homework before sprinting back across campus to the bus. He plopped himself onto a seat three rows back from the front door. The bus started moving almost before he'd sat down.

“Hey, Barry.”

Barry looked over at Jenny Leedy and her enormous green eyes and smiled weakly.

“I heard about what happened to Dirk. That was...something.”

He nodded. It was something, alright.

“Can you teach me how to do that?” she continued.

He shook his head. “Not really, no.”

“What if I...” she let a sly smile finish the sentence for her.

Barry felt the blood rush to his face, heard his pulse pounding in his ears. He opened his mouth, almost closed it again, and said, “I...uh...”

 _You idiot_ , he thought, _a girl...no, a woman, and a drop-dead gorgeous one with legs that don't quit is throwing herself at you and you're about say no, are you nucking futs?_

“Tell you what,” he managed, “how about we do dinner and go from there?”

After a long pause, she nodded. “Okay, sure,” she said.

“Pick you up at your place Friday at six?”

“Okay. You know where I live?”

“Uh...not exactly, no. Somewhere in Meadowmont.”

“I'll be waiting at the corner of Pine Drive and Coyote Road.”

“Great.” He paused. “I...I'll probably have to pick you up on the horse.”

She giggled. “Horse?”

He sighed. “Okay, she's a mule. And she's my uncle's. I'm pretty sure he'll let me use her. Don't have my permit yet, the quadrunner blew a head-gasket last week, and Mom's going to be away for school. So...” He let that dangle.

“That sounds fine, Barry,” she said.

He smiled. Maybe she was trying to use him for something. But every guy had to have a first date some time, right? Maybe he could salvage what was left of the week after all.


	2. Chapter 2

Barry pulled his Harley onto the gravel verge along Highway 431. His partner rolled up beside him on her own Indian 402.

“Still don’t know how you got that thing running,” he said to her after they’d cut their engines.

“Takes moxie,” she said.

He looked northeastward toward Reno, then at the alien flying saucer sailing ponderously past the shoulder of Sunflower Mountain to the north. “That’s gonna take moxie, too.”

She snorted. “Got that right. So, how do you wanna do this?”

Barry groaned. “You know what, Cougar?”

He still called her by her trail name most of the time, even now that the crap had hit the fan. Out of habit, mostly. But partly out of protection. Never mind that no one would possibly believe that she was _that_ Amelia Earhart.

“Nope,” she said, “never met him.”

He groaned and shook his head. “You’re an interesting woman, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told. And badly as often as not.”

“Come on, you know I mean it in a good way.”

Amelia eyed him critically, then smiled. For a moment, she looked far younger than her nearly one hundred years, even conspicuously younger than the thirty-nine years she’d been when the same aliens who’d taken him had snatched her and her plane out of the sky over the South Pacific.

Not that anyone could have known by looking at her. No, Amelia Earhart seemed permanently stuck at around thirty-something, as she frequently put it.

She grunted. “I’d say the same about you. You know, you’re the only man I’ve ever known who can really put the _up_ into ‘up against the wall.’”

Barry grinned, feeling his cheeks blush at the same time. Even at twenty-three, it could still be annoying when a woman could do that to him. Except Amelia.

Maybe it was the shared experience, or the way she’d kept in touch over the years. She’d been a pillar of stability for him and his mom during the post-abduction studies and quarantine they’d all been forced to endure, and then a sort of mentor via letters written back and forth in the care of his mom until they’d lost contact during his teenage years.

Maybe it was a personality thing. Whatever it was, something had sparked between them the week before the aliens had arrived.

By chance, they’d run into each other on the Pacific Crest Trail in early June while waiting for “Ray Day,” that mythical and ever-shifting date when most hikers agreed there’d been enough snow melted out of the High Sierra to have a hope in hell of finding the trail.

She’d been hiking to escape her past, he to escape his future. A week and a summiting of Mt. Whitney later, he’d finally placed her face, dragged out of his sparsely-remembered single-digit years. She’d laughed with that endearing gap-toothed smile.

They’d continued to go by their trail names, Heavyweight and Cougar. It had just seemed easier that way. They’d come to understand “trail magic” as more than just a few kind-hearted souls leaving coolers full of beers, piles of water jugs, or chests of moon pies, Snickers bars, and fruit at random spots on the trail, or letting a dozen dirty, smelly through-hikers use their shower and washing machine.

A lot of nonsense tended to melt away out there. Which seemed be part of the appeal, and one reason Amelia had said she’d taken up long-distance aviation. When a person was out there, it was just you and the sky, or the trail, and everything out of eye-shot became irrelevant.

So it was that the “wall” she’d mentioned had actually been three feet up a large Jeffrey pine trunk somewhere a week or so north of Yosemite. They hadn’t even noticed until he’d smelled the smoke from the fire she’d inadvertently set in the process. Then he’d twisted an ankle in the ensuing tumble and they’d barely doused the fire.

Once they’d come halfway down their adrenaline spikes, they’d laughed. A little later, they’d shared an opened sleeping bag, the words of Garth Brooks’ “That Summer” echoing through his head.

“So, Heavyweight,” she said, using his trail name, one that every other hiker he’d met had always thought was meant as an irony in the way of Little John from the Robin Hood tales, “do you think this plan of yours is going to work?”

Barry exhaled heavily. “Maybe. It’s still a bad plan.”

“Yeah. Wait, and let ‘em nuke the whole city, or don’t wait and let the crash nuke half the city. Hell of a choice, huh?”

“War is hell. That was...MacArthur?”

“Sherman. Or before. It’s true, no matter who said it.”

“I’m just glad these guys aren’t _our_ aliens. I remember kind of liking them.”

“Me, too.”

“This is probably going to set the forest on fire,” he said.

“Good thing there’s no one to arrest us for it,” she added.

He leaned over and kissed her. “You and your silver linings.”

She kissed him back. “Someone has to say it, right?”

Barry chuckled ruefully, then returned his attention to the alien ship. Thanks to that one, the Bay Area had been reduced to a charred ruin and, rumor had it, fighters and bombers from that ship had set everything else on fire as far north as Napa, as far south as Santa Cruz, and everything within what had been an hour drive of Sacramento inclusively. They’d even spit on South Lake Tahoe on their way over, apparently out of spite.

He snorted. “The inner and outer Coast Range is on fire. The Central Valley is on fire. The foothills are on fire. So are parts of the upper Sierra.”

“When you're on thin ice,” she said, “may as well dance.”

He nodded. “Heh. Something like that. You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she said.

Barry reached out with his mind. It danced over the skin of the ship, feeling the differences in texture, temperature, and density. He pushed inward, finding the mass of superstructure, of voids, of spaces with contents he could only identify as more or less dense, or as hotter or cooler. It took him more than half an hour to develop a model of the thing in his mind’s eye.

The engineering was so far beyond him as to be totally hopeless. But the structure, the places where one thing braced against another, where a massive object needed reinforcement and a very much less massive one not so much, that was as plain to him as the light of day. And that was the key to the whole thing.

Barry focused on an otherwise innocuous section of the bow of the ship, chose an area roughly the volume of a pro football stadium, and increased the gravity there. At first, nothing outwardly visible happened. But he knew that the aliens inside were beginning to feel heavier, as though they’d suddenly gained weight. Which, technically, they had.

He glanced briefly at Amelia, her own will focused on some part of the ship he couldn’t know. Somewhere in there, something was spontaneously combusting. Probably multiple somethings. For all he knew, there was less to burn than inside an oceangoing ship. And even if none of it supported combustion, there was no doubt in his mind that his Cougar could set an alien on fire, or at least boil it. He’d seen her do it to mosquitoes and a trout.

Barry pushed the gravity up. One and a half g...two...three...four. He could sense loose objects moving toward his chosen volume, seemingly of their own volition. Every alien there weighed four times normal.

He briefly thought of what it must be like to suddenly weigh nearly eight hundred pounds. Dislocated joints, fractured bones, organ stress, breathing? Oh, yeah, it was not going to be much fun up there. He opened out the volume and shoved harder.

The prow of the ship began to dip, so slowly at first, that an observer would probably mistake it for a normal descent. He imagined the aliens on the ship’s bridge, or whatever passed for one, frantically trying to solve the mysterious problems that had suddenly popped up. Personnel running around putting out Cougar’s fires, or trying futilely to keep something polymer from melting. Engineers trying to compensate for the shift in gravity, their own field generators not designed to handle a random internal gravity spike.

He shoved some more. Six g...seven...eight...now the volume, eight times that of a football stadium, may as well be half the size of Neptune. He could almost hear the screams, the bending and rending of metal pulled out of shape and position and crammed into his artificially generated center of mass.

A dull redness appeared amidships at its edge. Ah, he thought, that would be my Cougar’s doing! The glow brightened to orange. A horrible screeching noise vibrated the air. The ship hinged in half, the leading edge plowing into the center of Reno and throwing up a cloud of dust and small debris. Even at that distance, the ground shook.

Something inside the ship exploded upward, the noise of it hitting him like a thunderclap. The whole thing crashed to the ground, sending up a plume of dust and smoke. The ground shook so hard, that a cascade of rocks and debris slid onto the road behind them, and a nearby juniper toppled over in a clatter of gravel.

Barry released. Amelia lurched forward, caught her hand on a granite boulder, her knees quivering, and squeezed her eyes shut hard.

He stepped over and steadied her. “Amelia! Are you okay?”

She took a deep breath, held it, then slowly released it. “I think so. Maybe. I dunno.” She lifted her head and looked out at their field of victory. “What’s that expression you used...that sucked?”

“Uh...yeah. Maybe we shouldn’t do that again.”

She looked back at him and drew a ragged breath. “We might have to, if we’re the only ones who can get through those damned shields.”

“But the others...”

“Lots of ‘em died,” she interrupted. “I used that...what do you call it...Google. Lots of accidents involving your extreme sports.” She turned around and leaned heavily on the rock. “Not that I can blame them. And the others...” She cocked a thumb over her shoulder. “...victims of those bastards. So, no, not many of us altered ones left. If someone doesn’t figure out something clever, we have until we find the next ship to recover.”

“And if we don’t?”

“It’s our planet and we die trying.”

He exhaled heavily. “You know, you’d think that if we were supposed to be weapons against these guys, the others would have given us user manuals.”

“Oh, but where would be the fun in that?”

He chuckled. She would put it like that. “If I'd had one, I’d have spent less time in Detention. And maybe avoided juvie altogether.”

She smiled. “There is that, I suppose.”

He looked past her to the crash site, now half hidden in a growing cloud of dust and smoke. “How are we ever going to rebuild from this?”

“We’re not.”

“What?”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned since coming back, it’s that there’s no way to turn back the clock. If I had a nickel for every time I wished things would go back to the way they were in the thirties, I could have bought a tropical island by now. But that ain’t gonna happen. So, no, we don’t rebuild the old, because we can’t. We take some lessons from the crap we did wrong, and do it different.”

“Okay?” he said uncertainly.

She chuckled. “You know, that hurt like hell. But it kind of turned me on, too.”

He raised an eyebrow. “It did?”

She nodded, then tipped away from the rock and grabbed his jacket collar with both hands.

“Amelia,” he said, using her real name, “I really don’t understand you.”

She pulled him down and kissed him hard. “So?” she said once she let him up for breath.


End file.
